Rakefet Zalashik

Rakefet Zalashik was the AICE Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University for the Fall 2014 semester. Her work focuses on the history of psychiatry in Israel, Palestine and Germany; immigrant absorption and the integration of Holocaust survivors into Israeli society; the relationship between mental health and gender; and Israeli identity formation.

She is the author of Ad Nafesh: Refugees, Immigrants, Newcomers and the Israeli Psychiatric Establishment (Hakibutz Hameukhad, Tel-Aviv, 2008 [Hebrew]), Das unselige Erbe: Die Geschichte der Psychiatrie in Palästina und Israel (Campus Verlag, 2012 Frankfurt/ New York, 2012) and the scientific editor of the Hebrew translation of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (Resling, Tel Aviv, 2009). Her work has also appeared in journals such as Science in Context, The Journal for the History of Psychiatry, Israel Studies, Zmanim, and Korot: The Israel Journal of the History of Medicine and Science. In 2013, she co-edited A Jews Best Friend?: The Image of the Dog Throughout Jewish History(Sussex University Press), with Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman of Vanderbilt’s Jewish Studies program.

Dr. Zalashik received her Ph. D. in history from Tel-Aviv University in 2006, with a dissertation on the development of psychiatry in Palestine and Israel, 1892-1960. She was a Dorot Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University. She has held positions in the United States at the University of Virginia, and in Germany at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg and the University of Potsdam’s Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies. She has received fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, YIVO, and the University of Haifa’s Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society, among others.

Dr. Zalashik came to Vanderbilt with the support of a grant from the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise’s Visiting Israeli Professor Program.